Page:The Collected Works of Theodore Parker Politics volume 4 .djvu/130

118 of representation; but it fell to the ground, not to be lifted up by his successors for years to come. The refusal of John Quincy Adams, while President, to recognise the independence of Hayti, and his efforts to favour the slave power, excited no remark. In 1844, for the first time the anti-slavery votes began seriously to affect the presidential election. At that time the whigs had nominated Mr. Clay as their candidate, a man of great powers, of popular manners, the friend of northern industry, but still more the friend of southern slavery, and more directly identified with that than any man in so high a latitude. The result of the anti-slavery votes is well known. The bitterest reproaches have been heaped on the men who voted against him as the incarnation of the slave power; the annexation of Texas, though accomplished by a whig senate, and the Mexican war, though only sixteen members of Congress voted against it, have both been laid to their charge; and some have even affected to wonder that men conscientiously opposed to slavery cotdd not forget their principle for the sake of their party, and put a most decided slaveholder, who had treated not only them but their cause with scorn and contempt, in the highest place of power.

The whig party renewed its attempt to place a slave- holder in the President's chair, at a time when all Europe was rising to end for ever the tyranny of man. General Taylor was particularly obnoxious to the anti-slavery men. He is a slaveholder, holding one or two hundred men in bondage, and enlarging that number by recent purchases; he employs them in the worst kind of slave labour, the manufacture of sugar; he leaves them to the mercy of overseers, the dregs and refuse of mankind; he has just returned from a war undertaken for the extension of slavery; he is a southern man with southern interests, and opinions favourable to slavery, and is uniformly represented by his supporters at the South, as decidedly opposed to the Wilmot Proviso, and in favour of the extension of slavery. We know this has been denied at the North; but the testimony of the South settles the question. The convention of democrats in South Carolina, when they also nominated him, said well, "His interests are our interests: … we know that on this great, paramount, and